John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hi All,

After several months of preparation and designing it is finally time to start building my studio located in The Netherlands.
Of course I want to share the fun with you guys, so I'll keep you informed at this forum.

For those who are interested, and want to know what I did during design time,... you can look at: http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =1&t=11110

So first of all the design:
We will make a studio consisting out of the following rooms:
- Control Room
- Live Room
- Iso Booth
- Drum Booth

And will look like this:

The first pictures of the available space:

A few pictures with in total 300 meters (984 feet) of tape on the floor
This is something what everybody should do when building a studio. This showed me exactly what I done wrong when I made the layout on the computer. When you can walk over the tape and you have all the measurements on the floor you can imagine that it gives you a lot more information then the drawing you made on the computer. It tells you exactly if the layout works for the space.

Just subscribed to this topic, I'll be watching you ;)

This should be a nice place to be

What about kitchen/bathroom ? and do you plan on having a lounge by the entrance ?

Also, out of curiosity, what studio equipment and DAW are you using ?

What about absorbers and traps in the CR, are they a later issue or do you only have the Red corner traps in the back of the CR? (and what's the yellow thing behind the couch)

And will the couch me raised or something ? (wondering about the line in front of it)

And also, what is that yellow boxes in the live/drum/vocal room ?

And the small room to the top left, a storage ?

jeroenmuller - I'd look carefully at the depth of that drum booth. A full kit is around 2.4m x 2.4m plus you need additional space for mike stands etc. You room measures out at around 2m deep so I would suggest you won't fit a kit comfortably in that space.
I'd add at least another meter to the depth.

Hi all,

Thanks for the reply's, i'll quickly give an answer to some quiestions:

@Addni:
What about kitchen/bathroom ? and do you plan on having a lounge by the entrance ?
What you see on the drawing is a part of the whole building, just before the entrance is a lounge, restrooms and a kitchen.

what studio equipment and DAW are you using ?
The console I'm going to use is a modified soundcraft ghost (by http://www.creationaudiolabs.com/proaudio), connected to the Nuendo 4.5 DAW with an SSL Alpha Link and mixpander. Over a month, when I hope to install the equipment i'll post some pictures.

What about absorbers and traps in the CR?
In the CR I use the red corner traps indeed, and I've changed the design a little bit so that the front of the CR now also has corner traps. The yellow thing behind the couch was meant to be also a trap, but I think I'll remove that one and replace it with a good absorber.

And will the couch me raised or something ?
Yes, the couch will be raised a few inch.

what is that yellow boxes in the live/drum/vocal room
The yellow boxes are also corner traps,... maybe I should use more the same color for the same traps next time (I'm not that good in designing)

And the small room to the top left, a storage
Yes, this will be the place for some storage and also the place where the power distribution will be.


@ John Sayers:
You room measures out at around 2m deep so I would suggest you won't fit a kit comfortably in that space
Thanks for the advise, I'll have a look at it, what would you suggest as minimum measures for a drumbooth?

Well, the building materials are ordered and Thursday they will be delivered. So the official build starts next monday. I'm planning to post pictures every day.

Just for your information my schedule looks like this:
9 Jan t/m 8 Feb - Building studio walls & roof, together with HAVC and electrical
9 Feb t/m 22 Feb - Install and connect equipment
23 Feb t/m 8 Mar - Solve acoustical problems
9 Mar - Ready for first test sessions
Official opening @ 22 & 23 Mar

The studio walls & roof I'll build together with an external company to ensure I don't have any construction faults. The rest of the studio I'll build myself,... I have planned to work 8 hours a day on the project so I'll think it's a realistic schedule. Or do I oversee things?

First pictures I'll hope to post on Thursday when the building materials come in.

The studio walls & roof I'll build together with an external company to ensure I don't have any construction faults.

That will help to speed things up, but one thing you need to be careful of:

Does that company know about building STUDIOS?

If not, you need to educate them. There are many, many things they need to be aware of, and to do different from just building ordinary rooms. Such as carefully sealing and caulking all joints air-tight, making absolutely certain that there are no flanking paths between the inner leaf and outer leaf at any point, layering the green glue correctly and NOT thinking that it is supposed to be an adhesive, not mounting electrical plugs opposite each other in a two-leaf wall, and all of the other things that can mean the difference between the cheerful success and abysmal failure of your studio.

If they have never built a studio before, then you are going to have to watch them like a hawk, to make certain that they don't make any mistakes!


- Stuart -

The company's owner is a good friend of mine, and I'll be there to educate them as they work on the construction. We both read the great book "building studios like the pro's" and are reading a lot of topics on this forum. This is the first time I'm building a studio like this so, all the help is appreciated.

Soundman2020 wrote:Making absolutely certain that there are no flanking paths between the inner leaf and outer leaf at any point.

Can you tell me why this is a problem, like the walls between the vocal booth and drumbooth they have a flanking path, or do I misunderstand you?

Soundman2020 wrote:layering the green glue correctly and NOT thinking that it is supposed to be an adhesive

What do you mean by that?

Thanks in advance!

jeroenmuller wrote:The company's owner is a good friend of mine, and I'll be there to educate them as they work on the construction. We both read the great book "building studios like the pro's" and are reading a lot of topics on this forum. This is the first time I'm building a studio like this so, all the help is appreciated.

I'd suggest that you post lots of photos, so folks here can warn you if you just did something dumb, or are about to do something dumb!

Can you tell me why this is a problem, like the walls between the vocal booth and drumbooth they have a flanking path, or do I misunderstand you?

There should be no flanking paths at all. Each room is a separate room, that stands all by itself with a ceiling on top. There should not be any physical connections between any part of a room and any other room. Not even one nail or screw. Each room is one single "leaf", and all the rooms together are inside the outer "leaf", which is the walls of the building in your case. There are no other leaves, and no connections between them. You want two leaves around you, and only two. Never one, never three.

It's hard to see from your model, but I don't see where you have a hard connection between your vocal booth and your drum booth. However, I DO suspect that you might have a THREE-LEAF system there! It seems to me that you are building an entire two-leaf design inside of the building, but the building walls ARE a leaf, so if that's what you are planning, then you do indeed have a three-leaf system, and that is BAD. It will REDUCE your isolation to the rest of the building.

Can you post the actual SketchUp model of your design, so that we can take a closer look?

If you have a three-leaf design, you need to fix that. Fortunately, you did not start building yet, so it can be fixed easily and cheaply. All that you will waste is some of that masking tape, and a few hours of work.

I hope I'm wrong, and it is NOT a three-leaf design, but it does look like it from your diagram.

Soundman2020 wrote:layering the green glue correctly and NOT thinking that it is supposed to be an adhesive

What do you mean by that?

Thanks in advance!

Green Glue is not glue at all! You cannot use it as glue. It is not meant to be glue. That's just a name. It is an elastic acoustic damper that never dries fully, and it goes in between layers of sheetrock. It's purpose is to damp the walls, not to glue them together. And it has to be installed correctly to get the full benefit. At least two (better three) tubes of green glue per panel of sheetrock. If your builders try to use it like glue, and just dab a little bit on here and there, it won't work at all, and will probably make things worse.

- Stuart -

This is the way it looks to me: three leaf.

Yeah, there's 3 there... You could save a TON of money and actually GAIN isolation.

Neil

Soundman2020 wrote:This is the way it looks to me: three leaf.

This is the only way to keep some space between the outside windows and to keep space for the HAVC channels. The place where you see this three way problem wall it is indeed a double inner wall and than devided with 40cm space for HAVC channels and then comes the outside wall, so isolation to outside is not a problem I think. The space between the inner wall and outer wall is also there to use for cleaning and opening the outside windows.

I didn't know what you meant by flanking path (Sorry, Me stupid Dutch! ), but now you explained it I got it. I've checked the design and there are NO flanking paths, so that's good!

About the walls, what do you think is the best way for constructing the plasterboard to the studding?
I want to make it like this:
2 layers of 12mm plasterboard -> 100x50 studding (4"x2") with Rockwool -> 50mm airgap <- 100x50 studding (4"x2") with Rockwool <- 2 layers of 12mm plasterboard

Thanks for all the answers!

The place where you see this three way problem wall it is indeed a double inner wall and than devided with 40cm space for HAVC channels and then comes the outside wall, so isolation to outside is not a problem I think.

Ummmm.... yes it is a problem! You will have much WORSE isolation to the outside, since you have a THREE leaf system. Your isolation at low frequencies (drums, bass guitar, etc.) will be worse than it would if you REMOVE leaf number 2 (on mi diagram). If you remove that, your wall will give you BETTER isolation than leaving it in place. You can still keep your space for walking and cleaning...

- Stuart -

jeroenmuller wrote: Just for your information my schedule looks like this:
9 Jan t/m 8 Feb - Building studio walls & roof, together with HAVC and electrical
9 Feb t/m 22 Feb - Install and connect equipment
23 Feb t/m 8 Mar - Solve acoustical problems
9 Mar - Ready for first test sessions
Official opening @ 22 & 23 Mar

That's a tight plan, or did you leave out the "year" notation on purpose ?